Siasto: The Ultimate Work Collaboration Tool

Client

Nic Pantucci

Industry

Business

Location

USA

Core technologies

Ruby Ruby on Rails JQuery HAML Sass

Siasto

Improving Team Collaboration and Task Management with Siasto

It’s hard to develop collaboration and task management software that’s not only intuitive and flexible but that can also compete against enterprise software such as Basecamp, Zoho, and Asana.

Siasto’s concept for team collaboration and task management might look very similar to what competitors provide. With Siasto, you can create projects, assign team members to those projects, add tasks, and upload spreadsheets and documents. But these features alone are unlikely to satisfy many project teams.

Challenges

Siasto was already on the market when Nic Pantucci came to RubyGarage. The challenge was to make Siasto a genuinely advanced tool. Nic wanted to reanimate the existing application and add several new features. In addition, we concluded that Siasto was in need of integration with third-party services, could benefit from a mobile version, and could use some thorough refactoring and interface improvements.

We were responsible for the following tasks:

Performing a code audit to figure out the current state of the app and map out a course of action to revive the app
Implementing a rescue mission to reanimate the existing application — Numerous bugs and lack of automated tests on the backend prevented us from safely customizing and adding new features.
Ensuring that the application was stable and then extending its functionality with multiple integrations to improve task and event management as well as communication functionality
Ensuring secure data storage
Optimizing the app for mobile devices

People Tab

The tab allows companies to see all their team members in one place and conveniently add a new one.

Projects Tab

The projects tab allows to instantly add a new project and see current updates of existing projects.

Project Overview

The page features an overview of tasks in a chronological sequence as well as task scheduling.

Project Tasks

The tasks can be conveniently filtered according to the user's needs. In addition, users can create a new task, attach required files, and add people.

Project Files

Here users can store, create, and search for the required documents.

Solutions

Writing automated tests took us around a week, after which we refactored all the code. Once we finished writing tests and refactoring, Siasto was ready to be customized.

We started by implementing a few new features. Siasto users often communicate with others outside their own companies and need to save contact and company data for their clients. We made this possible by developing an online notebook.

Any collaboration tool must integrate with third-party services. In addition to integrating Siasto with Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, we also added support for ThinkFree, an online service that allows users to edit spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.

Finally, we developed the mobile iOS application for Siasto from scratch.

We took the following steps

Automated testing and refactoring. We wrote automated tests and refactored Siasto so we could make changes to the project without breaking existing functionality.
Integrated with Google Calendar. In order to synchronize tasks and events between Siasto and Google Calendar, we integrated Google Calendar support.
Integrated with Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides. We added the possibility to create and edit Google Sheets and Google Docs directly in Siasto. Siasto users can also import and export files to and from Google Drive.
Built a mobile application and backend API for mobile apps. The mobile app and backend API allow Siasto users to use the app on the go.

Technology Stack

Ruby
Ruby on Rails
jQuery
HAML
Sass
RSpec
Capybara
MySQL
Redis
Memcached
AWS
Nginx
Unicorn
Capistrano
DelayedJob
CircleCI
more

Results

The updated Siasto is the ultimate work collaboration tool that allows users to organize their workflows into projects so everything that’s related sticks together. Siasto’s powerful integrations let users connect with popular and familiar tools so they can enjoy frictionless collaboration that just works.
Siasto is advanced collaboration and project management software that allows businesses and enterprises to seamlessly share any data, documents, and tasks with 360-degree visibility of the organization’s current state.

Siasto

Nic Pantucci

Siasto Founder

Quite simply, I can’t give the RubyGarage team high enough praise. Whatever I may manage to scribble down will totally fail to represent my admiration of their abilities, and so all I will say is that any opportunity to work with RubyGarage should be grasped with both hands.

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